EDITORIAL COMMENT 
109 
the great majority of our small mammals have no common nameS; and authors 
are forever inventing them. Unhappily these newly invented names are often 
absurd, as Mr. Seton rightly says, and they very rarely fill any good purpose. 
The truth is that at present comparatively few of our small mammals need 
specific or subspecific vernacular names; a single common name for all the mem- 
bers of a genus is frequently quite sufficient, and for writers of technical mam- 
malogy to invent such names merely that their books or lists may be, in a sense, 
complete or consistent, is folly. The best plan unquestionably would be for 
authors of works on mammals to use only such common names as are actually 
in service; ignore ridiculous book names invented without sufficient cause; and, 
for a host of our species, wait until real names do appear in the language. If 
the comparatively few names introduced into the literature of North American 
mammals by Audubon and Bachman, and other early writers, have so signally 
failed, what then is the prospect for some of the later inventions now that our 
list of mammals has increased many-fold since those classic works were prepared. 
The most ambitious recent attempt at giving all of our mammals common 
names was that of the late D. G. Elliot, who systematically coined English names 
for most of the American forms. Beginning with his Land and Sea Mammals 
of Middle America and the West Indies in 1904, and continuing through several 
later works on the mammals of America and other parts of the world, Elliot 
thought it necessary to provide every single species and subspecies with a ver- 
nacular name. Without, apparently, any serious attempt to find out what 
names might already have been given to a few of these creatures, in print or 
otherwise, he proceeded to coin as unreasonable a collection of names as could 
well be imagined. One of the principal sources for these names was the technical 
names of the mammals, which he merely translated into English. The results 
are wonderful to behold. How many persons, including the most learned of 
professional mammalogists, know today what mammal is named the fighting 
bear, the thievish coyote, dark coati, allied weasel, irrational shrew, prominent- 
eared bat, doubtful kangaroo rat, graceful bat, captious harvest mouse, Hamil- 
ton Smith’s white-tailed deer, beautifully garbed chipmunk, cunning red-backed 
vole, trader spermophile,, robust field mouse, beautiful mole mouse, least upland 
meadow vole, roaming pocket gopher, alien mouse, sand-frequenting pocket 
gopher, smallest spiny mouse, autocrat timber wolf, robber raccoon-fox, happy 
chipmunk, narrow-headed spotted skunk, or the, curtailed fox? These atrocities 
are not carefully selected to show the horror of it all — they are listed at .random 
in a few moments’ time. There are hundreds equally bad, including the can- 
tankerous meadow vole, the cheating woodrat, the tricky coyote, and the de- 
generate otter. They were always carefully double-indexed in a special section 
called “Index of Common Names!” 
Very few of these names have ever been copied by other writers and certainly 
none of them have worked their way into the language of the layman or of the 
amateur naturalist, for whose benefit it is assumed they were coined. Occa- 
sionally we see some of them in print, probably because some author thinks it 
advisable to use names already formally bestowed upon certain animals rather 
than to make new ones. But of what use are they? Why should we use them? 
They are not com.m,oii na,mes in any sense, and they never will be known even 
to men devoting their lives to the study of mammalogy. In listing mammals, 
